Fox or Faux

By Zack Stoycoff
Hillpost Editor

Even the White House has been duped into popular misconceptions of the cable news network

Someone on the Joy Behar Show—a CNN commentary program—posed an interesting, passionate argument on Feb. 4 for why Fox News is biased.His reason: “Anchors” like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck clearly advocate conservative agendas.

He stuttered when corrected on air. They are opinion-based analysts, not anchors.
In that case, he said cautiously, everything would be fine if the network put the word “opinion” on the screen during these shows. The Fox News logo in the corner confuses viewers, he said.
Now, I’m not a blind, or exclusive, Fox News watcher—I subscribe to the theory that being exposed to multiple sources is the only way to get a well-rounded, accurate view of the news—but you have to admit: the criticism of Fox News is just getting senseless.

Even the Obama administration, which recently accused Fox News of being an illegitimate news network because of opinion shows like Hannity and Beck, seems to be jumping onto the ignorance train.

Yes, we live in a blog-obsessed world where people find it difficult to tell the difference between opinion and news. But there is something wrong, even by today’s standards, that a large segment of Fox News critics—including the White House—have missed such an obvious thing.

It’s a 24-hour network. That’s a lot of time to cover. It has both opinion and news.

Granted, Fox News is the top-rated cable news network because conservative opinion is what sells. And aside from liberal analyst Alan Colmes, its opinion programs are indeed conservative. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck get in front of the camera most nights and, to varying degrees, push conservative social views and criticize the political left.

But other times, anchors like Shepard Smith sit in the newsroom and run down the day’s news with no such analysis.

Surprisingly enough, research finds these news segments really do live up the “fair and balanced” slogan.

A UCLA study in 2005 found Fox News’ news programs the second-most neutral in the mainstream media, behind that of ABC. A scholarly-reviewed study by media research expert Tim Groeling in December 2008 also found Fox News considerably less slanted than its counterparts. Likewise, the Media Research Center in 2006 found that all major news networks, except Fox News, tend to skew their news to the left.

But as Americans, we don’t really look for facts. We’re a nation of highly-opinionated “experts” who regurgitate what we hear.
And now the problem has gone too far.

The Obama administration, including President Obama, began targeting Fox News in late 2009, likening it to “talk radio” and urging other networks to consider it more of a tabloid network than a news network.

When asked why, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said its coverage is biased and mentioned two programs: Hannity and Beck.

Alright, so if your only exposure to Fox News is from other networks’ sound bites of Beck’s alarmism and Hannity’s moral crusades, you’re going to think it’s a tabloid network. But has the Obama administration really stooped to this kind of media spoon-feeding for its conclusions?
Did Gibbs even bother to watch Fox News for a day?

And if government officials like to make such sweeping conclusions with small snippets of the whole picture—like neglecting to realize that Fox News’s 24-hour programming includes opinion as well as pure news—is it a stretch to wonder how rash they can be with issues that actually affect us?

One thing is obvious. The inability to think independently has spread to the highest levels of the American government.

You don’t have to like Fox News. After all, the majority of its opinion programming is conservative, and you might not like that. You might even dislike it for other reasons.
But you do have to do what the Obama administration couldn’t.
You have to know the facts.